Jambo Academy

The premise

Jambo Academy teaches Swahili — but the angle is sharper than another Duolingo. Their thesis: Swahili is the lingua franca of East African business, and the next decade of African economic growth will reward founders, NGOs, and journalists who can operate in it natively. So the curriculum isn't "order coffee in Nairobi." It's "negotiate with a Tanzanian supplier", "read a Kenyan tender document", "small-talk through a board dinner in Dar es Salaam."

The brief from the founders was: design and build a learning platform that doesn't look like Duolingo — premium, business-coded, but warm and human. Then ship the curriculum builder so they can grow without me in the loop.

The brand

I designed Jambo end-to-end. The palette is indigo and terracotta — a deliberate sidestep from the green/yellow that dominates language-learning UI, with a nod to East African textile traditions. The typography pairs a serif display face with a clean sans for body, so headlines feel editorial and lessons feel readable. A custom Africa-continent SVG motif appears on lesson covers and milestone screens — small enough to feel like a reward, structured enough to never feel kitschy.

What I built

• Lesson player — audio-first, with a dialogue replay UI, vocabulary cards that flip on tap, and inline grammar callouts. Spaced-repetition flow embedded in every lesson rather than bolted on as a separate "review" mode.
• Curriculum builder for instructors — drag-and-drop lesson composer, audio recorder built into the browser, automatic transcript alignment, role-based publishing. Instructors don't need engineering help to add a new module.
• Progress dashboard — streak tracking, mastered-words counter, dialogue replay archive. Designed to feel earned, not gamified-to-death.
• Mobile-first responsive — designed for phones first because most users will study during commutes. Tested on slow 3G in Nairobi via Chrome DevTools throttling. Every page weighs <100KB on first load.

Why Next.js

The instinct for an EdTech app is to reach for a complex SPA framework. I went with Next.js App Router because the bulk of pages are content — lesson copy, grammar notes, vocabulary lists. Server-rendering them gets the page in front of the user instantly. Only the lesson player itself needs hydration. The result is a site that loads in <1s on a 3G connection.

The Replit Agent handoff

I delivered the full Next.js demo, but I also delivered something the founders specifically asked for: a structured Replit Agent prompt that lets them spin up new courses (Yoruba, Amharic, Hausa) using the same template, just by editing a content config. Total time from "we want to add Yoruba" to "we have a working Yoruba course" went from "find a developer" to "spend an afternoon with the AI agent."

What I'd build next

The clear next addition is a conversation practice mode — voice-to-voice with an AI tutor for free-form practice. The infrastructure is there (Whisper for speech-to-text, Claude for response generation, ElevenLabs for voice). Twenty hours of build time. Material commercial differentiation.

If you're building an EdTech product or any content-heavy app where speed-to-first-page matters, the Next.js + Supabase + light-on-JS approach holds up well. More on the stack here.